During the recent spate of games known as this year’s basketball season, it has become painfully apparent that our men’s team couldn’t shoot freethrows to save their Telebear dates much less to win a damn game, conference or non. Now, our players are all — Jaimo excluded — magnificiently gifted to play the game of basketball, and no one could deny that they have made the most of their pituitary disorders. The players all — Jaimo excluded again — run, jump, pass, dunk, block, strut, knit, and pearl with godlike ease, which confounds and frustrates us fans even more. For we know that when one of the players has to step up to the line to shoot a freethrow, be it one-and-one or to convert on a three point play, he faces a herculean task, not unlike his third crack at the SATS.
So what’s to be done?
The team might adopt power forward Al Grigsby’s approach. Grigsby, you recall, has missed fewer freethrows than any of his teammates this year; unfortunately, such a tactic would require the entire team to stay on the injured list for ever and ever and ever and ever. We’d end up with a bunch of 8th year juniors who own a lot of expensive suits, but then we couldn’t really field a team this way.
What, you expected a legitimate solution? Hell I’d tell you if I knew, but then again if I knew, I’d be deep in hookers & gin care of the alumni slush fund. But failing to provide any such answer, I will at least reveal the findings of my bloodhounding efforts to discover why the Bears’ foul shooting is so very very foul:
For starters, there’s the “too much muscle theory,” which purports that the players have so much muscle mass that the fluidity of their upper- body motions are restricted, which undermines the accuracy of their shot attempts. I saw this on ESPN. Grunt.
At the RSF, I learned about the playground/hardtop/innercity/no sissy boys basketball hypothesis. Supposedly, today’s generation of players grew up playing a style of basketball that stipulates that when you got fouled, you’d take the ball at the top of the key, and so no one on the team knew what a foul line was much less how to use it until they began playing at the collegiate level.
Over in the Vermicology department they have a slightly more unorthodox angle. Their hypothesis, known as the ringworm theory, basically states that all the players are hopelessly infected with ringworms, and that anytime one of the players remains still for a moment, as is the case when they shoot foul shots, their ringworm flares up, disrupting their concentration. But then again, this is the Vermicology department’s hypothesis for everthing, so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it.
Some conspiracy freaks on Sproul claim that the basketball team is a highly elite sect of Free masons and that their missing foul shots, by some incredibly indirect connection, is the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar and keeping the details of JFK’s assassination under wraps.
I’ve also heard rumors to the effect that the players are too exhausted to shoot freethrows from the enormous strains of getting laid 24- 7, but then again the players don’t expend energy by actually going to class, so that cancels out.
Perhaps it’s Harmon gym itself. The players probably remember eating shit on a final they took in Harmon and they can’t help but choke-up whenever they think about it. Granted, this relies on the assumption that members of the basketball have eaten shit on a final before, which in turn relies on the much more dubious assumption that members of the basketball team have taken a final before.
After hearing these and about 5,001 other theories, I started to get fed-up. Maybe that’s why I’ve settled on what many people may consider to be a trite answer. Personally, I think what it all boils down to is that the players just like to rim. And so I sincerely hope that before the team ends the season without a trip to the NCAA’s, Coach Bozeman will sit down with his players and remind them of the appropriate times and places to rim.
